Samsung is exploiting the herd mentality of the Indian public following the foot steps of Maruthi and Hyundai.
Samsung despite pricing their products atrociouly is indeed dumping in India watered down, lower speced versions of the same international models.

^^ About time people start taking Indian ventures like Micromax, Xolo etc. a bit seriously rather than ridiculing them for being cheap. (even if being sold as cheaper substitutes so that they can get better foothold of the market). The Xolo Play (tegra 3 chipset) is a good example of how a relatively small time player in Indian mobile markets has brought some very good performance products at relatively cheap prices in a hope to capture markets.

I had put my Note 2 on charge today, plugging the charger into a spike buster. I see that charge had hardly crossed 50 percent after 2 hours where the charge usually used to be above 90 percent.

Then I went to settings and then battery. There the status showed as Charging (USB). I removed and plugged it directly to the plug and then it changed to Charging (AC). Now the charge rate is as expected.